In this edition of the Future of Work and Learning, Jeff Griffiths offers insights from The Productivity Project, a recently co-published six-report series. The series focuses on challenges facing the labour market as rapid technological advancements and globalization reshape regional economies.
The reports collectively address a pivotal question: how can human capital drive Canada’s productivity?
There appears to be a growing disconnect between what the Canadian economy says is needed and what the Canadian workforce generation system produces.
While employers complain about the skills of post-secondary graduates, the schools and degree holders feel that employers don’t value their training. This is reflected in growing rates of unemployment or underemployment for recent graduates from Canadian post-secondary institutions.
2025 data from the Labour Market Information Council (LMIC) shows there are 425,000 new grads in Canada, but fewer than 30,000 job openings requiring an undergraduate degree and limited experience.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has ranked Canada near the middle of the pack in terms of our adoption of a “skills-based economy paradigm.” That doesn’t sound too bad, but when you compare our ranking against peer economies, Canada lags far behind. And yet, Canadians are among the most educated people in the world, as measured by the percentage of the population with post-secondary credentials.
As a country, we spend an awful lot on post-secondary education.
For example, our recent research reveals that in Alberta, about $6.7 billion per annum is spent on all forms of post-secondary education for about 200,000 learners (five per cent of the adult population) – or $33,500 per learner in the system – and the figures for other provinces are similar.
About $3 billion of that is public funding with the rest coming from learners in the form of tuition and other fees.
But the evidence from employer surveys suggests that the number of employers who cannot find individuals with suitable levels of skill has increased significantly. The percentage of employers surveyed across all sizes and sectors of the economy reporting problems finding skilled talent more than doubled from 32 per cent in 2015 to 75 per cent in 2025.
Based on the evidence, our long-established, much vaunted, and very expensive system for learning and credentialing is not fit for purpose. What happened?
Speed and Agility
The current system evolved in a time of slow change and was able to adapt in that environment.
Institutional procedures that were designed for risk mitigation when change timelines could be measured in years, if not decades, were entirely adequate.
However, the ever-increasing rate of change in the economy, the built-in change resistance and slow rates of response/adaptation in the workforce generation system (i.e. schools) are, in systems terms, “weak feedback mechanisms.”
Change, when it occurs, significantly lags the events that trigger it and as such, there are inherently large oscillations and overcorrections in response to those changes. To use a hockey analogy, the players are left chasing the puck.
This reflects a view that the workforce generation and recognition/credentialing systems are simple and closed, making them controllable. The reality is that in the current economy, workforce generation systems are both complex and open.
Complex systems are characterized by behaviours that are both unpredictable and “emergent” – they happen spontaneously and through the interactions of the many variables in the system. Emergent behaviour is unpredictable and therefore uncontrollable.
But our institutions (government, public learning institutions, etc.) are built around the notion of control. This needs to change.
How can we start to recognize the innate complexity of the system and build adaptability and changeability or agility into the mix?
The answer is better signalling and feedback loops, which means better information, freely available to all the actors in the system. This implies a need for “open” systems: open data, freely available and interpretable by system actors, that can be used to adapt and change without artificial constraints.
In the past, this was a pipedream, but technological changes are making this an accessible reality.
Open learning records. Open HR standards. Universal learning and employment records linked to open badge technologies. All linked together in ways that encourage rapid adaptation.
In short, we need a learning system that learns. A system that embraces the emergent properties of complex systems – where change occurs without centralized control. Agility needs to be a feature of the system, not an accident.
As Eric D. Heinbocker states in The Origin of Wealth:
“While Complexity Economics strips away our illusions of control over our economic fate, it also hands us a lever – a lever that we have always possessed but never fully appreciated. We may not be able to predict our direct economic evolution, but we can design our institutions and societies to be better or worse evolvers”
The implication is for a radically different approach – uncoupled, decentralized ways to generate, assess and recognize competency. We need to break the “natural monopolies” inherent in our current system. And we need to do it now.
Project authors
Productivity Project authors include Dr. David Finch (Mt. Royal University – MRU), Dr. Chad Saunders (University of Calgary), Dr. Nadège Lèvallet (University of Maine), Dr. Sharon McIntyre (New Cottage Industries), Dr. Stephen Murgatroyd (University of Alberta), Dr. Irina Dowbischuk (Mount Royal University), and Janet Lane and Jeff Griffiths (Canada West Foundation), and with the support of the Alberta Centre for Labour Market Research (Dr. Joseph Marchand), MRU’s Institute for Community Prosperity, the Learning City Collective and the Canada West Foundation.
The Future of Work & Learning Brief is compiled and written by Jeff Griffiths and Stephany Laverty. Subscribe and stay on top of developments in the workforce and how education and training are changing today to build the skills and competencies needed for the future.
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